In many an English village there is nowadays a calvary. The novel
object merges with wonderful ease into the landscape, and one would
almost think it had always been there. The protecting wooden eaves have
already lost their rigidity and their varnish; the crucifix no longer
reminds one of the shop-window from which it came; it does not suggest
popish aggression nor the affectations of ritualism. Flecks of sunlight
play upon it familiarly, as upon the wayside stones, and it casts its
shadow across the common like any natural tree. The flowers in the
pots before it have withered, they droop half hidden in the ivy that
has overgrown them. Even the scroll of names has modified its official
ghastliness--all those newly dead obscure souls starkly ticketed
and numbered; the tragic page has got somewhat weather-stained and
illegible, and is curling up at the edges; it has become a dead leaf.
Decidedly the war-shrine is at home in the scene. It is a portion of
that unspoken truth which every one carries about with him, and the
people seem again to breathe freely under the shadow of the cross.
What does the cross signify? We are told that Christ died to save us,
and various analogies, legal, sentimental, or chivalrous, are put
forward to make that notion acceptable. I respect the sentiments of
duty and devotion which this doctrine of legal redemption can inspire;
they express readiness to do well, and in a certain moral sense, as
Hamlet says, the readiness is all; yet it is a conception of religion
borrowed from ancient lawyers and rhetoricians, a sort of celestial
diplomacy. The cross can mean something else; it can symbolize
poetically a general truth about existence and experience. This truth
is the same which the Indians express more philosophically by saying
that life is an illusion--an expression which is itself figurative
and poetical. It is certainly not an illusion that I have now the
experience of being alive and of finding myself surrounded, at least
in appearance, by a tolerably tractable world, material and social. It
is not an illusion that this experience is now filling me with mixed
and trooping feelings. In calling existence an illusion, the Indian
sages meant that it is fugitive and treacherous: the images and persons
that diversify it are unsubstantial, and myself the most shifting and
unsubstantial of all. The substance and fine mechanism which I do
not doubt underlie this changing apparition are out of scale with my
imagined units, and (beyond a certain point) out of sympathy with my
interests. Life is an illusion if we trust it, but it is a truth if
we do not trust it; and this discovery is perhaps better symbolized
by the cross than by the Indian doctrine of illusion. I will not say
that not to exist would not be better; existence may be condemned
by the very respectable criterion of excellence or "reality" which
demands in all things permanence and safety; but so long as we exist,
however precariously or "unreally," I think it the part of wisdom to
find a way of living well, rather than merely to deprecate living. The
cross is certainly a most violent image, putting suffering and death
before us with a rude emphasis; and I can understand the preference
of many for the serene Buddha, lifting the finger of meditation and
profound counsel, and freeing the soul by the sheer force of knowledge
and of sweet reason. Nevertheless, I am not sorry to have been born
a Christian: for the soul cannot be really freed except by ceasing
to live; and it is whilst we still exist, not after we are dead to
existence, that we need counsel It is therefore the crucified spirit,
not the liberated spirit, that is our true master.
Certainly the spirit is crucified, first by being incarcerated in the
flesh at all, and then again, after it has identified itself with
the will of the flesh, by being compelled to renounce it. Yet both
this painful incarnation and this painful redemption have something
marvellously sweet about them. The world which torments us is truly
beautiful; indeed, that is one of its ways of tormenting us; and we are
not wrong in loving, but only in appropriating it. The surrender of
this untenable claim to exist and to possess the beautiful, is in its
turn beautiful and good. Christ loved the world, in an erotic sense in
which Buddha did not love it: and the world has loved the cross as it
can never love the Bo-tree. So that out of the very entanglements of
the spirit come marvellous compensations to the spirit, which in its
liberation leave it still human and friendly to all that it gives up. I
do not at all accept the morality of the Indians in so far as it denies
the values of illusion; the only evil in illusion is that it deceives;
there is beauty in its being. True insight, true mercy, is tender and
sensitive to the infinite pulsations of ignorance and passion: it is
not deceived by the prattle of the child, but is not offended by it.
The knowledge that existence can manifest but cannot retain the good
reconciles us at once to living and to dying. That, I think, is the
wisdom of the cross.
There is a folly of the cross also, when the knowledge or
half-knowledge that life must be suffering, until it is cleared of the
love of life, erects suffering into an end in itself, which is insane
and monstrous. I suspect, however, that in asceticism as actually
preached and practised there is less of this idolatry of suffering than
the outsider imagines, who lying amid his cushions severely reproves
those who indulge in a penance. There is an asceticism which may be
loved for its simplicity, its clean poverty and cold water, hygienic
like mountain air; but flagellations and blood and night-long wailings
are not an end in themselves; no saint expects to carry them with him
into heaven; at best they are a homoeopathic cure for the lusts of the
flesh. Their purpose, if not their effect, is freedom and peace. I
wish Protestants, who find their ascetic discipline in hard work, were
equally clear about its object. From the worship of instrumentalities,
whether penitential or worldly, the cross redeems us: in draining the
cup of suffering it transcends suffering, and in being raised above the
earth it lifts us out of it. My instinct is to go and stand under the
cross, with the monks and the crusaders, far away from these Jews and
Protestants who adore the world and who govern it.
There is a mystical folly also among the Indians, when they assign a
positive bliss to pure Being; this, too, is substance-worship. Identity
with substance is deemed blessed because beneath the vicissitudes of
illusion, substance remains always solid, safe, and real. Certainly
substance, if there is such a thing, must be safe, real, and solid; for
we understand by substance whatever is constant in change. Hence the
desire to escape from illusion and from suffering hails a return to
the indistinction of substance as a positive salvation; remember that
you are dust, return to the infinite from which you came, and nothing
ominous can threaten you any more, the dust and the infinite are safe.
But changeless substance, being unconscious, cannot be blissful; the
attribution of divine bliss to it is an illusion of contrast, and,
like so much philosophy, mere rhetoric turned into a revelation. What
verbal mirage is this, to see happiness in fixity? Substance may
be conceived logically, and then it means pure Being; or it may be
conceived psychologically, and then it means absorption in the sense
of pure Being; or it may be conceived physically as matter, a name
for the constant quantities in things that are traceably transformed
into one another. Pure Being and the contemplation of pure Being seem
at first sight very different from matter; but they may be a dramatic
impersonation of matter, viewed from the inside, and felt as blind
intensity and solidified ignorance. No one calls matter blessed when
viewed externally, although it is then that its best qualities, its
fertility and order, come into view: yet half mankind have fallen to
worshipping matter in envy of its internal condition, and to trying to
fall back into it, because it is the negation (and yet the cause!) of
all their troubles. The idea of an intense nothing hypnotizes them,
it is the sovereign anaesthetic; and they forget that this intense
nothing, by its fruitfulness in the realm of illusion, has generated
all their desires, including this desperate desire to be nothing, which
turns that nothingness, by a last illusion, into a good.
If to be saved were merely to cease, we should all be saved by a
little waiting: and I say this advisedly, without forgetting that
the Indians threaten us with reincarnation. It is a myth to which I
have no objection, because only selfishness persuades me that if I am
safe, all is well. What difference does it make in reality whether
the suffering and ignominy of life fall to what I call myself or to
what I call another man? The only trouble is that the moral redemption
which is proposed to us as a means of safety instead of death, touches
the individual only, just as death does. Christ and Buddha are called
saviours of the world; I think it must be in irony, for the world
is just as much in need of salvation as ever. Death and insight and
salvation are personal. The world springs up unregenerate every morning
in spite of all the Tabors and Calvaries of yesterday. What can save
the world, without destroying it, is self-knowledge on the part of the
world, not of course reflective self-knowledge (for the world is not
an animal that can think) but such a regimen and such a philosophy
established in society as shall recognize truly what the world is, and
what happiness is possible in it. The force that has launched me into
this dream of life does not care what turns my dream takes nor how
long it troubles me. Nature denies at every moment, not indeed that I
am troubled and dreaming, but that there are any natural units like
my visions, or anything anomalous in what I hate, or final in what I
love. Under these circumstances, what is the part of wisdom? To dream
with one eye open; to be detached from the world without hostility to
it; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive sufferings without
forgetting for a moment how fugitive they are; and not to lay up
treasures, except in heaven.
How charming is divine philosophy, when it is really divine, when it
descends to earth from a higher sphere, and loves the things of earth
without needing or collecting them I What the gay Aristippus said of
his mistress: I possess, I am not possessed, every spirit should say
of an experience that ruffles it like a breeze playing on the summer
sea. A thousand ships sail over it in vain, and the worst of tempests
is in a teapot. This once acknowledged and inwardly digested, life and
happiness can honestly begin. Nature is innocently fond of puffing
herself out, spreading her peacock feathers, and saying, What a fine
bird am I! And so she is; to rave against this vanity would be to
imitate it. On the contrary, the secret of a merry carnival is that
Lent is at hand. Having virtually renounced our follies, we are for
the first time able to enjoy them with a free heart in their ephemeral
purity. When laughter is humble, when it is not based on self-esteem,
it is wiser than tears. Conformity is wiser than hot denials, tolerance
wiser than priggishness and puritanism. It is not what earnest people
renounce that makes me pity them, it is what they work for. No possible
reform will make existence adorable or fundamentally just. Modern
England has worked too hard and cared too much; so much tension is
hysterical and degrading; nothing is ever gained by it worth half what
it spoils. Wealth is dismal and poverty cruel unless both are festive.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The
easier attitudes which seem more frivolous are at bottom infinitely
more spiritual and profound than the tense attitudes; they are nearer
to understanding and to renunciation; they are nearer to the cross.
Perhaps if England had remained Catholic it might have remained
merry; it might still dare, as Shakespeare dared, to be utterly
tragic and also frankly and humbly gay. The world has been too much
with it; Hebraic religion and German philosophy have confirmed it in
a deliberate and agonized worldliness. They have sanctioned, in the
hard-working and reforming part of the middle classes, an unqualified
respect for prosperity and success; life is judged with all the
blindness of life itself. There is no moral freedom. In so far as minds
are absorbed in business or in science they all inevitably circle about
the same objects, and take part in the same events, combining their
thoughts and efforts in the same "worlds work." The world, therefore,
invades and dominates them; they lose their independence and almost
their distinction from one another. Their philosophy accordingly only
exaggerates a little when it maintains that their individual souls are
all manifestation of a single spirit, the Earth-spirit. They hardly
have any souls they can call their own, that may be saved out of the
world, or that may see and judge the world from above.
Death is the background of life much as empty space is that of the
stars; it is a deeper thing always lying behind, like the black sky
behind the blue. In the realm of existence death is indeed nothing;
only a word for something negative and merely notional--the fact that
each life has limits in time and is absent beyond them. But in the
realm of truth, as things are eternally, life is a little luminous
meteor in an infinite abyss of nothingness, a rocket fired on a dark
night; and to see life, and to value it, from the point of view of
death is to see and to value it truly. The foot of the cross--I dare
not say the cross itself--is a good station from which to survey
existence. In the greatest griefs there is a tragic calm; the fury
of the will is exhausted, and our thoughts rise to another level; as
the shrill delights and the black sorrows of childhood are impossible
in old age. People sometimes make crosses of flowers or of gold; and
I like to see the enamelled crucifix richly surrounded with scrolls,
and encrusted with jewels; without a touch of this pagan instinct the
religion of the cross would not be healthy nor just. In the skirts
of Mount Calvary lies the garden of the resurrection: I do not refer
to any melodramatic resurrection, such as is pictured in Jewish and
Christian legend, but to one which actually followed quietly, sweetly,
in the light of a purer day, in the cloister, in the home, in the
regenerate mind. After renouncing the world, the soul may find the
world more amiable, and may live in it with a smile and a mystic
doubt and one foot in eternity. Vanity is innocent when recognized to
be vain, and is no longer a disgrace to the spirit. The happiness of
wisdom may at first seem autumnal, and the shadow of the cross the
shadow of death; but it is healing slow; and presently, in the hollow
where the cross was set, the scent of violets surprises us, and the
crocuses peep out amongst the thorns. The dark background which death
supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.
Far be it from me to suggest that existence is the better because
non-existence precedes and follows it; certainly, if man was immortal
his experience could not include tradition, parentage, childhood, love,
nor old age; nevertheless, from the point of view of both bodily and
intellectual instincts immortality would be far better. But since, as
a matter of fact, birth and death actually occur, and our brief career
is surrounded by vacancy, it is far better to live in the light of the
tragic fact, rather than to forget or deny it, and build everything on
a fundamental lie. Death does not say to life that life is nothing,
or does not exist, or is an illusion; that would be wild talk, and
would show that the inspiration we had drawn from death was as little
capable of doing justice to life, as life itself is when mindless, of
discovering death, or learning anything from it. What the environing
presence of death teaches is merely that life has such and such limits
and such and such a course, whether it reflects on its course or not,
whether it recognizes its limits or ignores them. Death can do nothing
to our lives except to frame them in, to show them off with a broad
margin of darkness and silence; so that to live in the shadow of death
and of the cross is to spread a large nimbus of peace around our
littleness.
25
_TIPPERARY_
What a strange pleasure there is sometimes in seeing what we expected,
or hearing what we knew was a fact! The dream then seems really to hold
together and truth to be positively true. The bells that announced the
Armistice brought me no news; a week sooner or a week later they had to
ring. Certainly if the purpose of the war had been conquest or victory,
nobody had achieved it; but the purposes of things, and especially of
wars, are imputed to them rhetorically, the impulses at work being too
complicated and changeful to be easily surveyed; and in this case, for
the French and the English, the moving impulse had been defence; they
had been sustained through incredible trials by the awful necessity
of not yielding. That strain had now been relaxed; and as the conduct
of men is determined by present forces and not by future advantages,
they could have no heart to fight on. It seemed enough to them that the
wanton blow had been parried, that the bully had begged for mercy. It
was amusing to hear him now. He said that further bloodshed this time
would be horrible; his tender soul longed to get home safely, to call
it quits, and to take a long breath and plan a new combination before
the next bout. His collapse had been evident for days and months;
yet these bells that confirmed the fact were pleasant to hear. Those
mean little flags, hung out here and there by private initiative in
the streets of Oxford, had almost put on a look of triumph; the very
sunlight and brisk autumnal air seemed to have heard the tidings, and
to invite the world to begin to live again at ease. Certainly many a
sad figure and many a broken soul must slink henceforth on crutches, a
mere survival; but they, too, will die off gradually. The grass soon
grows over a grave.
So musing, I suddenly heard a once familiar strain, now long despised
and out of favour, the old tune of _Tipperary_. In a coffee-house
frequented at that hour some wounded officers from the hospital at
Somerville were singing it, standing near the bar; they were breaking
all rules, both of surgeons and of epicures, and were having champagne
in the morning. And good reason they had for it. They were reprieved,
they should never have to go back to the front, their friends--such as
were left--would all come home alive. Instinctively the old grumbling,
good-natured, sentimental song, which they used to sing when they
first joined, came again into their minds. It had been indeed a long,
long way to Tipperary. But they had trudged on and had come round full
circle; they were in Tipperary at last.
I wonder what they think _Tipperary_ means--for this is a mystical
song. Probably they are willing to leave it vague, as they do their
notions of honour or happiness or heaven. Their soldiering is over;
they remember, with a strange proud grief, their comrades who died to
make this day possible, hardly believing that it ever would come; they
are overjoyed, yet half ashamed, to be safe themselves; they forget
their wounds; they see a green vista before them, a jolly, busy,
sporting, loving life in the old familiar places. Everything will go
on, they fancy, as if nothing had happened.
Good honest unguided creatures! They are hardly out of the fog of war
when they are lost in the fog of peace. If experience could teach
mankind anything, how different our morals and our politics would
be, how clear, how tolerant, how steady I If we knew ourselves, our
conduct at all times would be absolutely decided and consistent; and a
pervasive sense of vanity and humour would disinfect all our passions,
if we knew the world. As it is, we live experimentally, moodily, in
the dark; each generation breaks its egg-shell with the same haste and
assurance as the last, pecks at the same indigestible pebbles, dreams
the same dreams, or others just as absurd, and if it hears anything of
what former men have learned by experience, it corrects their maxims
by its first impressions, and rushes down any untrodden path which it
finds alluring, to die in its own way, or become wise too late and to
no purpose. These young men are no rustics, they are no fools; and yet
they have passed through the most terrible ordeal, they have seen the
mad heart of this world riven and unmasked, they have had long vigils
before battle, long nights tossing with pain, in which to meditate on
the spectacle; and yet they have learned nothing. The young barbarians
want to be again at play. If it were to be only cricket or boating, it
would be innocent enough; but they are going to gamble away their lives
and their country, taking their chances in the lottery of love and of
business and of politics, with a sporting chance thrown in, perhaps,
of heaven. They are going to shut out from view everything except their
topmost instincts and easy habits, and to trust to luck. Yet the poor
fellows think they are safe! They think that the war--perhaps the last
of all wars--is over!
Only the dead are safe; only the dead have seen the end of war. Not
that non-existence deserves to be called peace; it is only by an
illusion of contrast and a pathetic fallacy that we are tempted to
call it so. The church has a poetical and melancholy prayer, that the
souls of the faithful departed may rest in peace. If in that sigh there
lingers any fear that, when a tomb is disturbed, the unhappy ghost is
doomed to walk more often abroad, the fear is mad; and if it merely
expresses the hope that dead men's troubles are over, the wish is
superfluous; but perhaps we may gloss the old superstition, and read
into it the rational aspiration that all souls in other spheres, or in
the world to come upon earth, might learn to live at peace with God and
with things. That would be something worth praying for, but I am afraid
it is asking too much. God--I mean the sum of all possible good--is
immutable; to make our peace with him it is we, not he, that must
change. We should need to discover, and to pursue singly, the happiness
proper to our nature, including the accidents of race and sex and the
very real advantages of growing old and of not living for ever; and we
should need to respect without envying all other forms of the good.
As to the world of existence, it is certainly fluid, and by judicious
pressure we may coax some parts of it into greater conformity with our
wills; yet it is so vast, and crawls through such ponderous, insidious
revolutions, all so blind and so inimical to one another, that in order
to live at peace with things we should need to acquire a marvellous
plasticity, or a splendid indifference. We should have to make peace
with the fact of war. It is the stupid obstinacy of our self-love that
produces tragedy, and makes us angry with the world. Free life has
the spirit of comedy. It rejoices in the seasonable beauty of each
new thing, and laughs at its decay, covets no possessions, demands no
agreement, and strives to sustain nothing in being except a gallant
spirit of courage and truth, as each fresh adventure may renew it.
This gallant spirit of courage and truth, you young men had it in
those early days when you first sang _Tipperary_; have you it still,
I wonder, when you repeat the song? Some of you, no doubt. I have
seen in some of you the smile that makes light of pain, the sturdy
humility that accepts mutilation and faces disability without repining
or shame; armless and legless men are still God's creatures, and even
if you cannot see the sun you can bask in it, and there is joy on
earth--perhaps the deepest and most primitive joy--even in that. But
others of you, though you were driven to the war by contagious example,
or by force, are natural cowards; you are perhaps superior persons,
intellectual snobs, and are indignant at having been interrupted in
your important studies and made to do useless work. You are disgusted
at the stupidity of all the generals, and whatever the Government does
is an outrage to your moral sense. You were made sick at the thought of
the war before you went to it, and you are sicker of it now. You are
pacifists, and you suspect that the Germans, who were not pacifists,
were right after all. I notice you are not singing _Tipperary_ this
morning; you are too angry to be glad, and you wish it to be understood
that you can't endure such a vulgar air. You are willing, however, to
sip your champagne with the rest; in hospital you seem to have come
forward a little socially; but you find the wine too dry or too sweet,
and you are making a wry face at it.
Ah, my delicate friends, if the soul of a philosopher may venture
to address you, let me whisper this counsel in your ears: Reserve a
part of your wrath; you have not seen the worst yet. You suppose that
this war has been a criminal blunder and an exceptional horror; you
imagine that before long reason will prevail, and all these inferior
people that govern the world will be swept aside, and your own party
will reform everything and remain always in office. You are mistaken.
This war has given you your first glimpse of the ancient, fundamental,
normal state of the world, your first taste of reality. It should teach
you to dismiss all your philosophies of progress or of a governing
reason as the babble of dreamers who walk through one world mentally
beholding another. I don't mean that you or they are fools; heaven
forbid. You have too much mind. It is easy to behave very much like
other people and yet be possessed inwardly by a narcotic dream. I
am sure the flowers--and you resemble flowers yourselves, though a
bit wilted--if they speculate at all, construct idealisms which,
like your own, express their inner sensibility and their experience
of the weather, without much resemblance to the world at large.
Their thoughts, like yours, are all positings and deductions and
asseverations of what ought to be, whilst the calm truth is marching
on unheeded outside. No great harm ensues, because the flowers are
rooted in their places and adjusted to the prevailing climate. It
doesn't matter what they think. You, too, in your lodgings in Chelsea,
quite as in Lhassa or in Mount Athos, may live and die happy in your
painted cells. It is the primitive and the ultimate office of the mind
to supply such a sanctuary. But if you are ever driven again into the
open, if the course of events should be so rapid, that you could catch
the drift of it in your short life (since you despise tradition), then
you must prepare for a ruder shock. There is eternal war in nature, a
war in which every cause is ultimately lost and every nation destroyed.
War is but resisted change; and change must needs be resisted so long
as the organism it would destroy retains any vitality. Peace itself
means discipline at home and invulnerability abroad--two forms of
permanent virtual war; peace requires so vigorous an internal regimen
that every germ of dissolution or infection shall be repelled before it
reaches the public soul. This war has been a short one, and its ravages
slight in comparison with what remains standing: a severe war is one in
which the entire manhood of a nation is destroyed, its cities razed,
and its women and children driven into slavery. In this instance the
slaughter has been greater, perhaps, only because modern populations
are so enormous; the disturbance has been acute only because the modern
industrial system is so dangerously complex and unstable; and the
expense seems prodigious because we were so extravagantly rich. Our
society was a sleepy glutton who thought himself immortal and squealed
inexpressibly, like a stuck pig, at the first prick of the sword. An
ancient city would have thought this war, or one relatively as costly,
only a normal incident; and certainly the Germans will not regard it
otherwise.
Existence, being a perpetual generation, involves aspiration, and
its aspiration envelops it in an atmosphere of light, the joy and
the beauty of being, which is the living heaven; but for the same
reason existence, in its texture, involves a perpetual and a living
hell--the conflict and mutual hatred of its parts, each endeavouring
to devour its neighbour's substance in the vain effort to live for
ever. Now, the greater part of most men's souls dwells in this hell,
and ends there. One of their chief torments is the desire to live
without dying--continual death being a part of the only possible and
happy life. We wish to exist materially, and yet resent the plastic
stress, the very force of material being, which is daily creating and
destroying us. Certainly war is hell, as you, my fair friends, are
fond of repeating; but so is rebellion against war. To live well you
must be victorious. It is with war as with the passion of love, which
is a war of another kind: war at first against the beloved for favour
and possession; war afterwards against the rest of the world for the
beloved's sake. Often love, too, is a torment and shameful; but it
has its laughing triumphs, and the attempt to eliminate it is a worse
torture, and more degrading. When was a coward at peace? Homer, who was
a poet of war, did not disguise its horrors nor its havoc, but he knew
it was the shield of such happiness as is possible on earth. If Hector
had not scoured the plain in his chariot, Paris could not have piped
upon the slopes of Ida, nor sported with his sheep and his goddesses
upon the green. The merchants of Crete or Phoenicia could not have
drawn up their black keels upon the beach, if the high walls of Ilium
had not cast their protecting shadow on their bales of merchandise,
their bags of coin, and their noisy bargaining. When Hector was no more
and the walls were a heap of dust, all the uses of peace vanished also:
ruin and utter meanness came to inhabit that land, and still inhabit
it. Nor is war, which makes peace possible, without occasions in which
a free spirit, not too much attached to existence, may come into its
own. Homer shows us how his heroes could gather even from battle a
certain harvest of tenderness and nobility, and how above their heads,
half seen through the clouds of dust and of pain, flew the winged
chariots of the gods, and music mingled with their banquet.
Be sad if you will, there is always reason for sadness, since the good
which the world brings forth is so fugitive and bought at so great a
price; but be brave. If you think happiness worth enjoying, think it
worth defending. Nothing you can lose By dying is half so precious as
the readiness to die, which is man's charter of nobility; life would
not be worth having without the freedom of soul and the friendship
with nature which that readiness brings. The things we know and love
on earth are, and should be, transitory; they are, as were the things
celebrated by Homer, at best the song or oracle by which heaven is
revealed in our time. We must pass with them into eternity, not in the
end only but continually, as a phrase passes into its meaning; and
since they are part of us and we of them, we should accompany them
with a good grace: it would be desolation to survive. The eternal is
always present, as the flux of time in one sense never is, since it
is all either past or future; but this elusive existence in passing
sets before the spirit essences in which spirit rests, and which can
never vary; as a dramatic poet creates a character which many an actor
afterwards on many a night may try to enact. Of course the flux of
matter carries the poets away too; they become old-fashioned, and
nobody wishes any longer to play their characters; but each age has its
own gods. Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging
some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it
will be. Our good mother Psyche, who is a convolution of this material
flux, breeds us accordingly to mindlessness and anxiety, out of which
it is hard for our youthful intellect to wean itself to peace, by
escaping into the essential eternity of everything it sees and loves.
So long as the world goes round we shall see Tipperary only, as it
were, out of the window of our troop-train. Your heart and mine may
remain there, but it's a long, long way that the world has to go.
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